sábado, 10 de marzo de 2007

Jiddu Krishnamurti y Aldous Huxley.

Aldous Huxley was born on 26 July 1894. His grandfather was a famous biologist, his brother a renowned zoologist, his mother a novelist and his great-uncle was a poet. His mother died when he was 14 and his brother committed suicide a few years later.

Huxley lost almost all his sight as a teenager. He worked as a teacher at Eton and published four books of poetry before writing his first novel. He published his most famous novel, Brave New World in 1932. It depicted a dark picture of the future.

In 1937 he moved to the United States where he wrote film scripts and became friends with famous actors, writers and scientists.

The range of Huxley's interests included Greek history, Polynesian anthropology, translations from Sanskrit and Chinese of Buddhist texts, scientific papers on pharmacology, neurophysiology, psychology and education, together with novels, poems, critical essays, travel books, political commentaries and conversations with all kinds of people, from philosophers to actresses.

One of the philosophers that deeply influenced Huxley was Jiddu Krishnamurti. He was drawn to his liberating message. "Artists, visionaries and mystics refuse to be enslaved to the culture-conditioned habits of feeling, thought and action which their society regards as right and natural," said Huxley. "Whenever this seems desirable, they deliberately refrain from projecting upon reality those hallowed word patterns with which all human minds are so copiously stocked. They know as well as anyone else that culture and the language in which any given culture is rooted, are absolutely necessary and that, without them, the individual would not be human. But more vividly than the rest of mankind they also know that, to be fully human, the individual must learn to decondition himself, must be able to cut holes in the fence of verbalized symbols that hems him in."

Huxley was an early environmentalist as well as a pacifist. He was refused American citizenship because he would not say his pacifism was a matter of his religion, which might have made him an acceptable conscientious objector.

He lost all his books and papers in a fire at his home after which he called himself "a man without a past".

Huxley remained nearly blind all his life. He died November 22, 1963, the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He was cremated, and his ashes were buried in his parents' grave in England.